


Andruil Watched From Beyond the Veil

by Mythalenaste



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Andruil - Freeform, Dalish Creators, Dalish Elves, Dalish Gods, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-15
Updated: 2015-03-15
Packaged: 2018-03-17 22:43:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,887
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3546491
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mythalenaste/pseuds/Mythalenaste
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The diminished remnant of an elven goddess speaks to Solas in the Fade.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Andruil Watched From Beyond the Veil

**Author's Note:**

> So wrote a teeny fic. It is Solas related and has SPOILERS. So best to only read if you’ve finished the game. :) Some Solavellan. It’s not exactly romancey though. Also might be edited later. It’s kind of more to calm myself down than anything else. I’m on an American Gods kick so this kind of demanded to be written.
> 
> "The visions are fragmented and a dark cloud spreads like spilt ink across the pages of possible futures." ~ Garth Nix

“Hello, Fen’Harellan.”

Solas felt sick, swooping dread slink down the back of his neck for a moment before he realised that whatever he had come upon in this corner of the Fade, it could not actually be the Inquisitor. No Dalish elf would picture themselves devoid of Vallas’lin, nor would the Inquisitor have been waiting for him like this. Lavellan dreamed with marvelous lucidity for someone who was not a mage, but that did not mean she always recognised that he was not a figment of her imagination.

“Who are you, to call me such?”

“You don’t remember me?” The voice seared from hurt to demanding in the bare space between words and Solas felt the chill of horror return.

“What…that’s not possible.”

“Scared, Dread Wolf? You don’t have to be. I cannot harm you, even if I wished. It’s hardly me, anyway. Just a piece. I can barely see you, barely touch you. This is just the smallest piece of me that slipped through a crack. The other’s…most of them sleep. They stopped watching and despaired.” The being before him looked on with a mood that flicked from melancholy to simmering fury and back again, reaching out with delicate fingers to trace the splintered curve of a broken bow held in the stone hands of an ancient statue of one of the elvhen. “I never stopped searching for a way free…all these centuries I searched and I searched. I hunted.”

“Andruil.” He murmured softly, watching the form that was identical to Lavellan look up at him with a combination of hope and insult all at the same time. Emotions in the Fade were just as important as what one saw, and this tiny shard of the goddess’s mind reflected both elation at his use of a name it had all but forgotten and fury that he, the Betrayer, should speak it. “Have you taken this aspect to unsettle me?”

“You have forgotten what I look like, Dread Wolf. I cannot choose how I appear. I am simply what you hunt for, your greatest desire. Is it an enticing form? Perhaps you may look upon it and finally understand your folly.” The faint shadow of what had once been the Elvhen goddess of Sacrifice and the Bloody Hunt looked upon him from his vhenan’s face and it stung more than any physical weapon ever could.

Andruil had never been the worst of them, in her time. She had wanted to defeat their enemies and in doing so protect not only her own interests but the other Creators’ as well. She had been willing to take that duty upon herself in it’s entirety. She had been willing to sacrifice her own sanctity of mind and soul to achieve the unachievable…in this way, Lavellan reminded him of Andruil. In this, his vhenan’ara’s choice of Vallas’lin had been infinitely appropriate.

But the Dalish had long since forgotten the darkness of the tales of Andruil. She had not been immune to excesses, she had hunted the elvhen mercilessly in her time and for her own sport. The sad and frightening truth that the Goddess of the Hunt had come back from battling darkness mad with battle lust, her mind torn by the brutalities she had both witnessed and committed. She looked upon the flawed nature of Elvhen existence and had told all of it, her beautiful face twisted with rage, her eyes haunted and wild as a rabid beast. She had been a thing crazed by pain, tortured by visions of bloody battles in which all violence was eternal. She had hunted her prey so far into the shadow that she could no longer see the light. It had taken Mythal’s intervention to save her from herself, from the bleak darkness that had threatened her mind. She had not always been a victim, of course. He had had reason to lock her away beyond her fits of wrath…but it was still horrible to see the mixture of steely resolve and broken soul that was what imprisonment had made of her. Andruil had suffered many things, but she had never before been chained.

“It was never meant to be this way.” It was a poor consolation and he should have known better than to attempt to break the silence, to engage the shadow of an unstable, broken divine being in conversational defense.

“No!? What did you think would happen?! The mortals could rule themselves?! The slaves would know what to do with freedom when it was given to them!? WE CALLED YOU BROTHER AND YOU BETRAYED US!” Her words screamed from lips suddenly pulled back in a vicious snarl, from a throat torn with a thousand sobs and carrying the weight and rage of ancestral agony so great it pressed upon him like a mighty vice. The gut wrenching sickness returned full force when he looked into the familiar face and saw only hatred and betrayal. Even in a facsimile, a Fade echo of what could be his vehnan’s face, it stung with a fresh pain heaped upon old wounds.

“Ir abelas.” He clutched his face in his hands, the oppression of her sorrow, her desperation, trapped and scrabbling like an animal and watching, the whole time watching the world she had fought for burn.

“Your sorrow means nothing to me. I do not care how sorry you are, Wolf of the Rebellion. What you have done is unforgivable…but then, the world is such a place. Will always be such a place. Once, I tried to tell all of you that there was no good, no evil. That all simply happened as it happened. I had achieved that clarity, through battle and through darkness. Mythal robbed me of it as a kindness. ” Her expression twisted with injured bitterness, eyes alight with desperate sorrow as she paced before him. “ And then I witnessed it again. I have looked through the Eluvian of my prison and watched all that we were stricken from the earth. I watched and I could do nothing, I beat myself bloody against the walls but I could help no one, not even myself. I watched the horrors you slept through!” Her accusatory tone increased in volume, her fingers clenching and unclenching in fists as her rage surged and abated like a tide within her. She turned violent, unnaturally cerulean blue eyes on him in a glare that in her prime and physical form could have frozen her enemy in their tracks. “You cannot stand before me and tell me you are sorry and expect it to matter!”

“Andruil. I needed to stop the war, the slavery…we were going to destroy ourselves-”

“You did not know that! You could not have seen all ends and I…hoped. I had hope.” The words felt like a punch to the stomach. Andruil had hoped for little after her fits began, the spirals of fury and unreasoning lust for a world stripped bare of meaningless morals and conventions. She had been all but lost to that darkness completely. But even she, in the moments before he trapped her forever, had held onto the belief of positive change.

“I called to you, Dread Wolf. So many times, I cursed your name as I strove to be free. But I finally began begging when the Elvhen started to die. ‘Please, Fen’harel, forgive me brother for what I have done to displease you. Forgive us. If I must suffer than so be it, but do not let this happen to the People.’ I called and called and called. I prayed, like the Dalish do to us even now. Your mortal cries out to me in battle, when she is in pain, when she is lost. I am her goddess and I hear her, watch her through the spaces between the bars. You thought us all hateful, incapable of caring for the Elvhen-”

“You were destroying the world-”

“So what, you wanted the honour of doing so yourself? You saw only our flaws and only your righteousness. You locked us away when we could have helped! I called to you, Brother. I asked you to wake, I pleaded and I am not a creature who pleads. How could you not hear me? I humbled myself in my desperation, thinking you must be ignoring me out of spite. But you never heard, you never came. You only woke when it was too late-”

“Please. Enough.” He could not look into that face that Andruil was wearing and not picture the Inquisitor before him, looking on chunks of stone work and weathered statues with such a depth of feeling and awe and pain that it made his very heart ache. Holding dust and ruin in her hands, wearing the slave tattoos on her face and worshipping every broken piece of misconstrued history. Who would she have been, what potential would her spirit have held in a brighter world? What had he done?

How could he one day look into those eyes and tell her the truth? That it was he who had robbed what remained of the elvhen people of everything in a vainglorious attempt to right the wrongs of a corrupt and power hungry family of selfmade gods? She would hate him…or worse yet, she would react with sorrow instead of anger and he would have nothing but her pain like blood upon his hands. Or she would stupidly forgive him, her shallow mortal mind incapable of processing such an enormous failure.

“Do you finally see what you have done?” Andruil turned to him, her wrists bound by the cruelest of shackles. Her fingernails broken and bloody from clawing at the walls of her prison. Her mosaic loomed behind her, shattered and distorted and missing tiles. She looked so much like Lavellan that he could no longer bear it, the guilt sang so loudly in his heart that it drowned out every half formed defense he might have thought or uttered.

“I’m going to release you, I promise. I’m going to fix it.”

“How?” For the first time, Andruil’s voice did not echo across the Fade. It did not boom with strength or resonate with the force of her will. It was small and lonely and it was the voice of his vhenan.

Solas sat bolt upright, gasping for lungfuls of cold, clean mountain air. He pressed a hand to his chest, felt his heart hammer against his palm and tried to calm himself. A dream? Or a true encounter with whatever tiny, tiny piece of Andruil had been able to slip through the cracks rent in the fabric of the Beyond by his focii? It had been clever, taking on the mortal form of the Inquisitor to entice him. It had not attempted to affect him with anything other than it’s words…indeed, it had claimed an inability to do so, a helplessness. It’s voice…over the centuries he had not forgotten that voice. Andruil. Or whatever was left of her.

How? He looked down at where the Dalish woman lay beside him, locked in a dream somewhere. I watch your mortal from the spaces between the bars..He bent over her and kissed her brow, stroking the hair back from her vallas’lin traced forehead.

“However I have to.”

**Author's Note:**

> It’s a bit goofy, I know. But I feel like we don’t talk about the other Creators enough so yeaaah. Plus, I feel the need to reiterate that this is a tiny(and a little bit weepy) piece of Andruil’s mind. It’s the most desperate part. Feel like Real in the flesh her is ready to call down an almighty smack down on Solas’ ass.
> 
> It's an uncommon interpretation I know...
> 
> Also headcanon that a little piece of Falon’din is actually laughing his evil tits off somewhere. Like I feel like Falon is the ACTUAL shithead of the pantheon. 
> 
> I’m so much better at writing pissy gods than romance...


End file.
